This video is only a minute long, and there’s really not that much to it, but—I don’t know, it just works. UK-based animator Junior Jessman wanted to pay homage to a favorite video game and TV series, both of which happen to have a purchase on a distinct style of badassery, and the result is this slapdash Ryu-vs.-Jesse Pinkman masterpiece. All the characters look somewhat like Playmobil figurines or possibly Mr. Potato Head, but the love still flows through, what with the use of well-chosen audio samples and video effects. I love the cacti wearing cowboy hats to give the battle a solid sense of place.

Alternate history is a fascinating genre of fiction. You have your anachronistic nostalgia, like steampunk, but that tends to be largely aesthetic, and I’m not that into parasols or goggles. (Also, the glorification of less technology tends to overlook some really inconvenient historical realities, like how inefficient steam power actually was.) I prefer my alternate histories to be horrifying dystopias, and “what if the Nazis won?” certainly fits the bill. There are some critically acclaimed novels based on that very premise—Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Robert Harris’ Fatherland, and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, but this has to be the first time a video game has been set in a world where Hitler triumphed.

The Wolfenstein video game franchise has produced nine editions in total (the original in 1981), all of which are based on fighting Nazis. The latest incarnation, Wolfenstein: The New Order, takes place in the 1960s, where the player navigates a Nazi-controlled Europe in hopes of launching a counter-offensive against the regime. What appeals to me, of course, is the custom-made soundtrack—the “commercial” below is for a compilation of the 1960s “Nazi pop” that will play throughout the game.

The pre-order for Wolfenstein also includes a package of “artifacts,” like postcards and military patches, but it’s the soundtrack that really establishes the mood for a game. There’s prom-worthy slow-dances, bubblegum pop, growling rockabilly, beach-blanket bingo surf rock, and even some Teutonic psychedelia. You can listen to the whole thing here. I feel like the fact that I speak absolutely no German actually frees up my ear to recognize the attention to sonic detail.

Who would have guessed that the Holocaust wouldn’t make for a perfectly peachy board game for the little German children of the Third Reich? As it turns out, getting rid of all the Jews just isn’t that much fun. (Of course, given sound game design principles, just about anything can be made fun, but foregrounding one’s own small-minded intolerance and hatred and desire to exile a minority group is probably not the first step in that creative process.)

In 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were passed in Germany—these laws codified the desire of the Nazis, at a minimum, to segregate Jews from all areas of public life. In effect the laws—which communicated the idea, “You’re not wanted here!”—were a powerful argument for accelerated out-migration. Those Jews who could afford it and who also avoided the tragic tendency to rationalize away the hatred directed towards them, got the point, and left if they hadn’t already done so. As the years ticked by, the urgency of getting some kind of exit visa would only increase.

A year after the Nuremberg Laws, a company called Günther & Co. released a Parcheesi-style board game; its title was one of the ugliest phrases in human history—Juden Raus! The title is best translated as, “Jews, Get Out” or possibly “Get Rid of the Jews” depending on your conception of agency, and is the most succinct possible expression of the official German attitude towards Jews under the Third Reich. (The word “official” is important here. Anti-Semitism was certainly popular enough to become a key pillar of the ideology of the state, but just as Tea Partiers don’t like Obamacare, not all Germans were equally afflicted by the disease.)

“Juden Raus! Das Neue Gesellschafts-Spiel” (“Out with the Jews! The Game of the New Society”)

In the game, young Germans across the Reich were encouraged, in what practically seems a parodic Firesign Theatre-style intervention, to move the six “Jew” game pieces around the board in such a way as to secure them on spots outside the metaphorical “wall” of the German state such that they would be transported “Auf nach Palästina!” (Off to Palestine!). Each game piece came with a conical “dunce”-style cap with a grotesque Jewish caricature on it. On the board itself were two little pieces of doggerel that helped explain the goal of the game: Zeige geschick im Würfelspiel, damit du sammelst der Juden viel! (“Show skill in this dice game, so that you gather up all the Jews!”) and Gelingt es Dir 6 Juden rauszujagen, so bist Du Sieger ohne zu fragen! (“If you succeed in chasing six Jews out, you’re the winner, without a doubt!”) At a guess, the inherently cooperative nature of something like the Holocaust interferes with the competitive imperatives of a good board game. In other words, how did the game work, exactly? If I exile three Jews and you exile just two, then I win? It doesn’t quite make sense.

“Off to Palestine with you, little Jew!”

Surprisingly, the best evidence we have suggests that the Nazis themselves didn’t like the game. Why? Because it had the effect of trivializing such the, er, “noble” task of purifying Germany. In one of the most remarkable bits of prose I have ever read, the Nazi newspaper Das Schwarze Korps in December 1938 published a brief review in which they sharply criticized the game.

This invention ... is almost a punishable idea, perfectly suitable as grist to the mills of hate of the international Jewish journaille, who would show around such a piece of mischief as a proof for the childish efforts of the nazistic Jew-haters with a diabolic smirk, if it would appear before her crooked nose.

-snip-

Jews out! yes of course, but also rapidly out of the toy-boxes of our children, before they are led into the dreadful error that political problems are solved with the dice cup.

In a recent academic paper about the game, which they aptly label “History’s most infamous board game,” Andrew Morris-Friedman and Ulrich Schädler get in the final word:

What insights are achieved from “Juden Raus!” about Nazi culture? It is hard to imagine a family sitting at a table playing a game that taught racial hatred. Yet it seems there were people like Rudolf Fabricius who imagined that some families would do just that. Fabricius was one of those mere supporters who thought to make some profit by following in the wake of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda. Today most people react with disbelief or disgust when informed of the game’s existence. “Juden Raus!” shows that after decades of propaganda, anti-Semitism was so deeply rooted in German society in the 1930s, that someone thought it would be a good subject for a children’s game. Racism is present in many board games, but “Juden Raus!” is unique in its portrayal of how racism manifests itself in society and is a terrifying example of the banality of evil.

In my research for this post, I stumbled across a more contemporary attempt to depict the full horror of the Holocaust in the form of a board game. Brenda Brathwaite’s 2009 game Train turned the task of loading little yellow people onto trains for some undisclosed final destination, with the reveal, late in the game, that the destination is actually Auschwitz, although the game’s suitably grim visual design gives the punchline away well before that point is attained.

Here’s a 2009 video from The Wall Street Journal about Brathwaite’s game Train:

You wake up. The room is spinning very gently around your head. Or at least it would be if you could see it which you can’t.

If you recognize these sentences, then geek out with me. This past weekend was a joyous one for Douglas Adams fans. The delightful, classic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure PC game was modernized and relaunched Saturday by the BBC Radio 4 Extra in honor of its 30th anniversary. March 8th was also the date of the Hitchhiker’s Guide radio show’s first broadcast in 1978. Episodes are being curated and rebroadcast here.

One of the first video games based on a science fiction book, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy sold an amazing 350,000 copies on its initial release for Apple II, Macintosh, Commodore 64, DOS, Amiga, Atari 8-bit, and Atari ST. 350,000 copies may not seem like a big deal now, but in 1984 when PC owners were very much in the minority, it was almost unheard of. It placed the game solidly in Infocom’s all-time top five bestsellers.

Gaming in the olden days…

The original packaging included a “Don’t Panic!” pin-on button, a packet of “pocket fluff” (a cottonball), the order for destruction of Arthur Dent’s house, the order for destruction of Earth written in Vogon, official Microscopic Space Fleet (an empty plastic bag), Peril Sensitive Sunglasses (made of black cardboard), the brochure How Many Times Has This Happened to You?, and no tea (a recurring theme in the game). The online 20th anniversary edition won an Interactive BAFTA Award for Best Online Entertainment in 2004. Still located on BBC Radio 4’s ancient server, it has never stopped attracting visitors on a daily basis. The new version has HD graphics and sound, as well as a Twitter feed @h2g2game.

I have unsuccessfully tried to explain to my offspring that, even though our Jurassic-era PC games lacked sound and graphics, they were still fun! Like Planet Fall and other Infocom games, playing Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy meant that you died in a multitude of ludicrous ways. Mashable’s Stan Shroeder called the game “infamously hard and wickedly funny. Often the most logical course of action will only yield a sarcastic remark from the game’s AI engine, while to progress you must do something completely ridiculous.” Many puzzles, especially the first few, were notoriously difficult to solve even if you had read the book. There were even T-shirts printed up by Infocom for braggarts wanting the world to know they had freed the Babel fish.

I doubt if there’s ever been anything funnier on a computer than this. That goes for the adventure itself which veers from the storyline of the book, but I was so overcome with the excitement at getting a babel fish out of the dispenser that I couldn’t go any further. Buy it.

These fascinating playing cards are the work of a Slovenian artist named Boris Kobe who was held by the Nazis as a political prisoner in Allach, which was a sub-camp of the Dachau concentration camp near Munich. Kobe lived to see the end of the war, and was a very successful architect in his native Slovenia afterwards; he died well into his seventies in 1981. His most prominent project after the war was probably the restoration of the Ljubljana Castle with Jože Plečnik.

As I see it, it’s a little unclear when and where these cards were made. Sources uniformly describe them as having been made “at Allach”—yet at least one of them appears to have been made after the Allied liberation of the camp, and it’s difficult to imaging Kobe hanging around the camp for very long after that. Certainly there wasn’t weeks of clandestine card games going on after that crucial moment. It’s difficult to tell, but there might be a little rhetorical sleight of hand going on there.

Whatever the case, the cards are simply remarkable. First, they look pretty great; Kobe was a gifted caricaturist, and there’s a lot of pleasure to be gained simply from looking at them. But most importantly, they show a life at Dachau close-up in the frankest terms. The cards depict inmates and guards alike, although most of the figures depicted are inmates forced to do back-breaking work, crowded into bunk beds, disrobing en masse, and, of course, as a pile of skeletons. The king of clubs is depicted as a skeleton.

As I mentioned, these cards were almost certainly created after the liberation of Allach on April 22, 1945 by the 42nd Rainbow Division of the U.S. Army. How do we know this? It’s apparently depicted in one of the cards: Card XXI seems to show liberation, the Slovenian flag, and a tombstone-like image marked “Allach” that is being consumed by flames.

The cards are intended for a game variously called Tarock/Tarot, but the word tarot here is likely to be misleading to English-speaking audiences. Tarock/Tarot is a trick-based game like spades or gin that was popular in the Habsburg Empire and Europe generally for centuries. So this is not a tarot deck in the occult sense as we would think of it; that should be obvious from a glance at the cards, which lack characters like The Fool, The Magician, The Hanged Man, The Sun, and so on. To their creator Kobe and whomever else originally used them, it was just a regular deck of playing cards. I have family in Austria and on my visits there we would sometimes play a related game called “Schnapsen” which didn’t require four players and used a restricted deck, I think the cards only went down as far as the eight card. Basically a game of Schnapsen there was equivalent to the way dominoes is played in a lot of places, you’d play it aimlessly and shoot the shit and gossip.

Take for instance this goofy—and impossibly rare—Atari 2600 curiosity, “Red Sea Crossing.” The primitive “run and jump” game—watch out for those snapping clams and snakes—was created by an independent designer named Steve Stack in 1983. Obviously, the Old Testament story of Moses parting the Red Sea served as the basis of the game, which was advertised in religious magazines. It came packaged with an audio tape narrated by—who else—Dale Evans Rogers and a coloring book. (WHO was the target market for this item?)

The game was never sold in stores and was was only available for $34.95 from the manufacturer. As a result, it’s one of the rarest Atari 2600 games, what’s been describe with tongue only partially in cheek as a “holy grail” for collectors. The game wasn’t even known to exist by the collectors market until one cartridge was found at a garage sale in 2007. That cartridge was auctioned off for over $10,000 in 2012.

Video games are in an interesting place right now, on the cusp of becoming an interactive narrative art form that can accomplish virtually anything. Game are still just barely constricted by certain encumbrances such as points, leveling up, stages, bosses, and so on, but with every passing day each of those elements gets ever so slightly less necessary, and as processing power and screen quality steadily increase, the options for a distinctive story or emotional palette become correspondingly wider.

There have been elegaic, winsome, cryptic games for a while now, but a game like 9.03m packs an emotional wallop that no “improvements” on Candy Crush Saga or Fruit Ninja could ever achieve. The name 9.03m is a reference to the magnitude of the earthquake that occurred just off the Japanese coast on the 11th of March, 2011, triggering a horrendous tsunami that devastated an enormous swath of northeastern Japan. The Tōhoku tsunami took nearly 19,000 lives and caused an immeasurable degree of dislocation and property damage. It’s an unimaginably tragic event, and 9.03m attempts to grapple with its emotional toll.

Created by the Scottish gaming company Space Budgie, 9.03m is brief and (essentially) pitched as the easiest point-and-click game ever created—it’s somewhat reminiscent of the mid-1990s game Myst or 2012’s PS3 game Journey. it’s not intended to offer heart-palpitating gameplay in which anyone could ever lose him or herself in the heat of competition. It is purposefully game-as-remembrance; to concoct a truly challenging puzzle would be to miss the point utterly.

For 9.03m, Space Budgie ingeniously shifted the action to Baker Beach in San Francisco, where the moon has rendered the ethereal landscape a gorgeous blue hue as the iconic Golden Gate Bridge looms benignly in the distance. The task is to collect butterflies that are embedded in objects strewn on the beach, each bit of debris representing a single victim of the tsunami’s incomprehensible devastation. Each object is braced by a silhouette of a person, which dissipates into mist by the time you can interact with it. (The first item, a soccer ball, may be a reference to the soccer ball later found off of an Alaskan island that was traced back to a Japanese schoolboy.)

That last detail should provide a clue to the gut-wrenching emotional power that 9.03m can evoke. (The slowness of the game and the tinkly piano score may drive some users up the wall, but that’s okay.) The game costs $1.99 on Steam, and (once the company’s expenses are recouped) all of the proceeds go to Aid For Japan, a charity for children who lost their parents in the Tōhoku tsunami.

Don’t worry, I’ve got your holiday gift ideas covered this year: What about this delightful handmade taxidermy mice chess set by Etsy shop TheCurious13? There’s only one available and it’s retailing for $450.00.

The Daily Mail (natch) is reporting this 3-course meal in a can for gamers—by artist Chris Godfrey—as a new (and real) thing. I, however, have the sneaking suspicion that this is just a clever viral hoax as there’s nowhere to actually buy this 9-layered vomit feast online. You know the drill: You can’t give someone money for something? It probably doesn’t exist.

CineFix does a very good job here of translating the unforgettable images and motifs of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining into the halcyon days of about 1989, when the most effective hack to fix your malfunctioning cartridge was to blow into it.

The game that CineFix shrewdly chose to mimic here appears to be the old LucasFilm (later LucasArts) game Maniac Mansion—the title alone is an almost perfect recapitulation of The Shining, and the gameplay appears to have been too.